When Bill Charlap started playing the piano at age 2, he was just doing what came naturally. “I can’t remember a time I DIDN’T play the piano,” the jazz pianist says. After all, his father, Morris “Moose” Charlap, wrote the music for Mary Martin’s “Peter Pan,” and his mom is Grammy-nominated singer Sandy Stewart. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree: This week marks Bill Charlap’s eighth year heading up the 92Y Jazz in July festival, running tomorrow to July 26 (details at 92Y.org/jazz/). One highlight is the July 18 celebration of Bill Evans, the late, legendary “poet of the piano” whom Charlap calls “one of the handful who moved music forward.” Here are four books he loves on the history of song and jazz.

American Popular Song

by Alec Wilder

Wilder was one of the great songwriters, and a great character. I don’t always agree with him, but he knows what it is to write these songs, and he describes them with excitement. It’s the first time songs by people like Gershwin, Porter, Berlin and Kern were treated the way you might treat Mozart string quartets.

Jazz Piano: A Jazz History

by Billy Taylor

In a way, jazz is America’s classical music. And you can’t get a greater teacher than Billy Taylor. His book goes through different periods and different pianists. Because he was there, he could talk about the “cutting contests” Fats Waller and other stride pianists had with each other: “What’s wrong? Is your left hand broken?” It was like a meeting of jazz gladiators.

Easy to Remember

by William Zinsser

I love this book so much that I used Zinsser’s first paragraph [in a talk] at the Y: “Play me a Hoagie Carmichael song and I hear the banging of a screen door and the whine of an outboard motor on a lake — familiar sounds from summer in a small-town America that’s long gone but still longed for.”

Let’s Get to the Nitty Gritty

by Horace Silver

This is an autobiography by someone who was in the trenches: Silver came up playing with people like Miles Davis and Stan Getz — he’s a jazz superstar! You’ve heard his music, even if you don’t know it, like “Song for My Father” [it’s on YouTube]. This book is like sitting down and having a conversation, face to face, with one of your heroes.